Blockchain technology emerging. Magical internet money that is virtually impossible to counterfeit. Centralized banking everywhere concerned. Government trying to figure out how to tax it. Public is skeptical. Tech geeks, libertarians, and venture capitalists adopts. What an exciting time we live in!

I bought bitcoin by searching for a seller on craigslist, starting with a small order and increasingly larger over time to build trust. The goal was to get it on an exchange, btc-e instead of "empty" gox luckily to "day trade". I was a noob so my 1000 dollars turned into 300 which I have left right now (yes I suck that bad at trading). And its still very risky. Maybe btc-e will steal it like gox, maybe 'bleeding heart' will. So I'm not investing any more, just playing with what I invested originally. My current trading strategy is to zoom out (on a place like bitcoinwisdom) until you see PREDICTABLE waves, and even those sometimes aren't predictable but there is a pattern. I don't bother with any time scale that has randomness because trading pros will bulltrap/beartrap you, trick you etc. Like the 3 day chart right now has fairly predictable wave patterns. So I'll buy at maybe 300ish, but I'll buy namecoin probably (all altcoins follow the same basic bitcoin chart overall on larger time scales) because that has higher payoff percentage potential. It is bear as a mutha now overall since the bubble of 1000, so you have to aim for the 1 green candle and dodge the 4 red ones. Forbes on the bubble:http://www.forbes.com/sites/jesseco...e-stages-chart/
which seems like it might go to 200ish eventually, not sure what after that. I sure as hell didn't buy in on the 'smart money' phase of that chart.. even though I knew about it when it was only 10 bucks a bitcoin probably. I mostly lost on stupid xpm, because btc-e doesn't have a xpm/usd, only xpm/btc, so you lose whether you're in xpm OR btc in overall bearness. I tried the strategy of long term holding then which was retarded in this bear ass market.

I buy in fractions, and buy more when there's blood in the streets. I bought a bunch of bitcoins when it bottomed out at $340 back in April 11th. I'm over halfway to my goal of owning 1/1,000,000 of bitcoins that should ever exist (21 BTC).

While having stake other altcoins like Lite, Doge, and Solar, my analysis is that their securities are questionable due to their comparatively low hashrate, making them extremely vulnerable to a 51% attack. Take Aurora and Dogecoin for instance.

The biggest advantage of bitcoin over other altcoins is the secure hashrate resulting from the first mover advantage and network effect. At 50 PH/sec, bitcoin's network hashrate is about 100x of all the altcoins combined, and several folds the computing power of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

Many people say that bitcoin is backed up by nothing. They're wrong. Bitcoin is backed up by over 30,000 programmers and is currently biggest distributed computing project in the history of mankind.

If you were an institutional investor, the first thing you're going to look for is security. Being a high risk investment as bitcoin is, the altcoins are even higher risk than bitcoin as of today. For the next few years, nothing can come close to contesting bitcoin's status as the premier cryptocurrency.

The only concern I have about crypto is the tendency towards people relying on centralised exchanges when it's designed to be peer-to-peer. Aside from the horrific security track record, I'm not sure I follow the logic in replacing one profiteering middleman (banks) with another (exchanges).

It also boggles the mind that people would instinctively trust complete strangers on the internet to look after their money for them. If someone was standing on a street corner with a glass box and said you could put your cash in there and they would look after it for you. You then place your cash in the glass box without knowing who that person was or how to contact them. Then you come back the following day to find that either the glass box has been broken into, or it has simply vanished. That would be a stupid thing to do. Yet people seem ready and willing to do it with digital money.

But I'm sure people much smarter than I am are hard at work on a new decentralised exchange model. The whole Sidechains and Treechains thing sounds promising. Until then, don't leave your digital cash in web-wallets or exchanges. If you don't have control over your private keys, you don't have control over your bitcoins/litecoins/whatever.

FireFish said:
I cant trust services like this yet. But last year i was seriously contemplating on setting up a mining machine... which i did not do eventually.

Mining isn't considered the way to go for new users unless you have a vast budget to spend on specialised hardware. It's essentially an arms race. If you haven't got the fastest hardware, someone else is going to beat you to the reward.

I once tried mining a new coin at it's launch because the developers claimed it would be mineable on a CPU at the start while the difficulty was low. It wasn't. People had already figured out how to mine it with GPUs, which was faster. Anyone who tried mining with their CPU got nothing.

Why would you buy burgers with buttcoins if their deflatory basis dictates that it's better to sit on them and use filthy fiat instead? That way your money pile keeps growing and that stupid paper you gave to the burger person loses value by the second, futher increasing the share of global wealth you own by impoverishing the rest. Win-win! Never use bitcoins for paying, just sell when the value is peaking and then go back to hoarding.

Even though its not widely adopted currently, an advantage is that it is a big potential money amplifier (with tons of risk...). If whatever coin is worth 1.2 and you buy and sell at 2.4, that is DOUBLE (minus exchange fees) whatever you invested. If you bought 100 dollars worth you now have 200, but if you bought 1 million you now have 2 million.. it can be exponential by doing it repeatedly, like if you start with 500 bucks, say you make 10 percent each trade, here you wind up with 53,359 after only 50 trades:
[500, 550, 605, 665, 732, 805, 885, 974, 1071, 1178, 1296, 1426, 1569, 1726, 1898, 2088, 2297, 2527, 2779, 3057, 3363, 3700, 4070, 4477, 4924, 5417, 5959, 6554, 7210, 7931, 8724, 9597, 10556, 11612, 12773, 14051, 15456, 17001, 18702, 20572, 22629, 24892, 27381, 30120, 33132, 36445, 40089, 44098, 48508, 53359]

But its not that easy, to trading newbs especially. Be careful, don't gamble more than you can risk losing, and it is a bear market mostly right now. I'm following the larger time scale 3d charts now. I have just kept my money on btc-e by the way because my main purpose now is to trade on the waves, and it hasn't been lost/stolen yet after probably like a year (well aside from my own trading stupidity turning 1000 into 300 like a boss), but time will tell.

Cool, the one and only thing I could use btc for within 100 miles is renting a cabin 15 minutes away for an unknown amount of btc. The website only lists rates in silly fiat dollars. In fact I can find no mention whatsoever of btc on the listing. Not even a "Our btc rates are subject to change hourly so we obviously can't list them"...so why is it on coinmap?

gggmork said:
an advantage is that it is a big potential money amplifier (with tons of risk...).

I thought crypto currency warriors were all about ending the fed and relinquishing the sway of the fiat USD? You know instead of treating btc tantamount to investing in beanie babies or warcraft gold.

It amazes me that the people that usually get suckered into the oldest of scams have advanced degrees.

The guys who made bank on this whole cryptocurrency fad aren't the ones with said cryptocurrency.

It is amazing how much of a bubble ancaps and other Bitcoin proponents are in. Just the question, "Why?", makes ancaps froth at the mouth, spouting heterodox nonsense, conspiracy theories, Randroid fantasies, and damn near paranoia. Even the first post reads "Centralized banking everywhere concerned." How? Because a bunch of programmers made a distributed-computing math game that gives out Chuck E. Cheese tokens?

It's some primal thing being milked here. It's the same shit that causes otherwise responsible citizens to go apeshit and buy gold, silver, or other metals under the guise of "investing" (Hint: They're the same people that fell for whatever Billy Mays was selling). There is an entire legion of suckers buying into this woo.

And finally, if people can't be responsible with fiat currency, how the hell can they be responsible with Bitcoin?

Csonicgo said:
It is amazing how much of a bubble ancaps and other Bitcoin proponents are in. Just the question, "Why?", makes ancaps froth at the mouth, spouting heterodox nonsense, conspiracy theories, Randroid fantasies, and damn near paranoia. Even the first post reads "Centralized banking everywhere concerned." How? Because a bunch of programmers made a distributed-computing math game that gives out Chuck E. Cheese tokens?

Hyperbole aside, I agree wholeheartedly. The Bitcoin community is a toxic circlejerk echo chamber, one of the worst I've seen in the entire time I've been on the Internet, and I've been around a while now. The consistently hilarious bitcoin.txt Twitter account does a great job of documenting some of the insane shit that people say about it.

Buy some Bitcoins if you really must, but for the love of god don't listen to anything those nutjobs say.

For three years, I sat on the sideline neutrally watching bitcoin develop without any financial stake. The same criticism posted here is nothing that hasn't been voiced before.

"It's backed by nothing."
"It's a ponzi scheme."
"The bubble will burst."
"Fad."

People fear and deride what they don't understand. If you grew up in the 90's, you'd remember a similar sentiment from the public on the emerging technology called the internet: a harbor for criminals, hackers, and pornography. Yes, that is true, but the internet has become so much more.

If you read the Satoshi whitepaper on bitcoin, you would know that the bitcoin network represents an elegant breakthrough in establishing a distributed ledger system that requires no third party trust: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/1/html/

Cryptocurrency is a totally new, uncapitalized market with at least three magnitudes of growth left before maturity. After seeing that the latest Chinese ban and numerous hacked exchanges didn't destroy the fundamentals of the market. I jumped in.

There are plenty of naysayers out there with reasons why bitcoin won't succeed, but remember that history almost never sided with the naysayers (history of flight). Cryptocurrency represents a new, uncapitalized market that will eventually contest centralized banking. The writing is on the wall.

Doom Marine said:
Cryptocurrency represents a new, uncapitalized market that will eventually contest centralized banking. The writing is on the wall.

Market? Explain to me how crypto currencies like bitcoin or dogecoin or anything resembling them could work in lieu of the existence of the USD, euro or yaun.

Even gggmork of all people admits in this very thread that it's nothing other than a vehicle to amass fiat USD. It's 100% speculation, that's all it is. You can save the 'help end the fed with ron paul internet funny money' nonsense.

B. Eliminating 3rd Party Trust - Without cash, you essentially have to trust a third party in processing your payment, be it Paypal or Mastercard. With cryptocurrency, no trust is required. This eliminates overhead as well as potential privacy breach (see Target hack). For most online purchases, a trusted third party is necessary, for everything else, there's bitcoin.

C. Counterfeit Resistance - The blockchain's distributed ledger and consensus system makes it virtually impossible to counterfeit crypto. Don't get me started on fiat...

D. Store of Value - This is debatable. Yes, bitcoin and other crypto are volatile, but it's only 5 years old and hasn't reached its market saturation yet. If bitcoin ever stabilizes a few years down the road, it becomes a great way of storing your wealth from tax collectors and thieves alike (if you're tech-savvy). Fiat is a terrible store of wealth due to arbitrary inflation with the current system.

1. Bitcoin dies, crypto lives.
Bitcoin may die to a black swan event (I think this is unlikely), but the cryptocurrency genie is already out of the bottle. The distributed technology ledger eliminates third party trust, counterfeit, arbitrary inflation, and overhead. It will revolutionize banking in ways untold.

2. Bitcoin lives, fiat lives.
The most likely outcome in my opinion. Cryptocurrency and fiat reaches an equilibrium, where crypto excels in store of wealth, overseas remittance, fiat excels in everyday purchases. In order to live, fiat (centralized banking) will have to adapt, and that means reevaluating their credit policies.

3. Bitcoin lives, fiat dies.
The most unlikely outcome in my opinion, as fiat has too much infrastructure. If this ever happened, the bitcoin you know would be counted in terms of GDP, and we would be using denomination of cryptocoins created from bitcoin's sidechains for everyday purchases.